It will require an immense change in modern conceptions before any wholesale education in the art of love can be given in this country. None the less, it is indispensable to right living and happy loving. It remains for the wise individual to educate herself, by extensive reading of literature upon the subject, and by a personal contact with those in a position to know. It is an idealistic dream to hope for such education now. But, we can be optimistic, for the history of any radical idea is that it has been proposed, hooted at, persecuted, and finally adopted. VI. THE PRICE OF ERROR. _Youthful Restraint._—While full sex-knowledge is advised at an early age, sexual practices are by no means so desirable. The adolescent girl should save her strength until she has acquired full bodily maturity. This is best, not only for herself, but for her children. The children of immature women are, in nine cases out of ten, weaklings. The girl is not bodily prepared for this great strain. She has not enough strength of body or mind to give to the proper development of the child she is carrying. Since the girl herself is not fully grown, since her mind is young and still largely unformed, and her body just stepping out of childhood and groping toward womanhood, how can she expect to give birth to a child fully equipped with all the potentialities of ripe maturity? The offspring of girls are necessarily more than immature, since, obviously, the child cannot possess more than its parents give it. Therefore, self-restraint, during the body-forming period of adolescence, is the only way of securing a rounded flowering into womanhood, and the surety of healthy children. Sexual restraint during adult life is an entirely different matter. There is a certain misguided medical backing available to support the theory that men and women can abstain for life without damage to them. There are occasional high bloodless ascetics who can change the suppressed desire into a mysticism soothing to themselves and to others of the race. But for the average man and woman, a life of abstinence is a physiological crime. Such people are warped and twisted out of any chance of normal happiness. Such living runs diametrically opposite to the true physiological needs implanted in every human being. On a large scale, it is suicidal to the race; individually, it is destructive of a rounded normal development. The woman who remains denied for life acquires all the caricatured attributes of the “old maid.” She acquires a sour disposition, and is the bitterest gossip concerning even the normal sexual practices of other women. She is the waspish snappy school teacher to whom the guiding of the youthful mind is assigned, with ultimate harm to it. In both men and women, a life of abstinence is worse than a mistake: it is, in its truest sense, a perversion.